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Is it possible to have roaming profiles for remote users?

We have a number of people who work on different sites, and I want them to be able to share laptops.

A lot of my research concludes that I would need to try and force a VPN connection prior to the user logging in for everything to work properly.

If so, how could I set up such a thing using Active Directory?

I'm hoping that remote users who travel between multiple sites can pick up a laptop (kept track of in our inventory) and move about as required. We need to be able to have all the laptops connected to the main server, where documents will be stored / backed up, and be able to push software updates to them. When a user logs in, they will have all their documents, etc. I don't think it would be convenient to have so many different user accounts on the laptops (potentially up to 30 users, across 6 laptops). There could be a better way to approach it, which I am willing to explore

Michael Hampton
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1ntgr
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    Depending on the size of the profiles and the availability of network at the remote sites, you might be better off enabling roaming profiles with offline files. Have the laptops sync profiles when they return to the office, but everything would be local while they are working in the remote location. The cuts down on network loading time over potentially slow connections, but still allows for a mostly central storage. If this is something you are interested in, I can make it an answer, if not use the other ideas. – Naryna Apr 01 '16 at 15:51

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Roaming profiles are not a good practice for mobile/notebook users. Performance saving/restoring the profile would be terrible, and dodgy network network connectivity would result in frequent corrupt profiles.

The use case is not compelling. The main functionality reason to use roaming profiles is to preserve application configuration/settings and other preferences.

Even if this were not notebooks/mobile users and was on a LAN, with roaming profiles you should always minimize the amount of data in the profile as much as possible. Not doing that would result in quickly escalating multiple GB roaming profiles. That typically means leveraging Folder Redirection, combined with Offline Files for mobile users.

Greg Askew
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This could probably be made to work, but roaming profiles generate a lot of network traffic; unless you have really fast Internet connections both at your company and in every place your users could possibly go, it's best to avoid them. If an user ends up at a place with a slow connection, he/she will have to wait a lot upon logging in and out.

Massimo
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This is more of a VDI or Remote Desktop use case than a Laptop use case. Avoid roaming profiles between separate physical locations. This will save you headaches later.

Related questions here on this topic are several years old, and probably no longer relevant.

blaughw
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